MacUser UK, Vol. 11 No. 21, October 1995

Excerpt from the review by Keith Brindley

Reunion 4.0: Genealogy software with a true Mac interface for families with up to 30,000 members.

Although it's been around for a while in the US, Reunion has only recently reached the UK. British genealogists should rejoice, for there's really nothing else quite like it. Reunion was designed for the Mac and, while a Windows version exists, it is truly at home here. Dialog boxes, windows, menus and buttons all conform properly to the Mac interface, so getting around a family tree is both simple and logical...

...Chart generation uses a separate utility, SuperChart. It is interfaced pretty cleanly with the main Reunion application, and a menu choice is sufficient to launch SuperChart and draw a chart of up to 11.5 square metres (if you've enough family members to fill it.) You needn't even be aware the two processes are separate.

While it's perfectly obvious my great-great-great-great-grandfather Jim was a famous canal builder, it's not sufficient in genealogy to state that without proof or evidence in the form of birth certificates, marriage certificates, wills and so on.

Reunion helps by cataloguing details of all these in an integral reference database accessed from within the family file. You mark the reference number on the family detail in any particular family card, just as you would in a paper-based record. Up to 999 references can be incorporated. Once data is in a family file there are several ways of getting it back out in a useable way. You can print out family cards directly. Searches can be made to isolate particular facts -- say you want to locate all family members born in Newcastle upon Tyne between 1750 and 1850. You can export a report (in several styles) to a word processor. But most powerful is the exporting, and importing, of genealogical data communication (GEDCOM) format files -- the TIFF of the genealogical software world. GEDCOM provides the means of transferring data with any other comparable application or even another Reunion file you want to merge yours with...

...Reunion runs in 1Mb of RAM on any Mac, which means PowerBook users can easily use it while researching family history centres and the like. Of course, you can do it all with HyperCard or a similar hyperlinking program to create your own stack of family detail cards. But Reunion does it cheaply and with some flair.